Best concrete patio sealant

Answer:  I do not know which is the best sealant, but in this post I show two products that appear to have some promise.

But first, a rant.

Actually I do always rant. 

In this previous post, I wondered aloud why Houstonians tend not to maintain their fences with pressure washing and stain.  In our land of cheap housing, we live in gorgeous McMansions, most of which are surrounding by cedar enclosures that reflect appalling neglect, or at least an incongruent plain-ness.

There's simply no comparison:  Our backyard four years ago in its very early stages of development, before and after fence staining.  For a few bucks and a few hours of time, this, too, could be your look.  Pics from this post. 

It is with a similar degree of exasperation that I wonder why most Houstonians do not clean and finish-seal their concrete.

This type of blackness and despair is the eventual result of non-action.  At left you see the edge of our concrete patio, freshly pressure-washed.  At right you see a concrete paver stone that has not yet been pressure washed.  Prior to washing, the appearance of the patio essentially matched that of the stone to the right. 

Not only is this kind of mildew and algae build-up unsightly, it's dangerous because it's very slippery when wet.  More than once I have nearly broken my neck after losing my footing in this area.

Unfortunately, the remedial choices are few, especially if you do NOT want an epoxy or "wet look" sealant, both of which I think make outdoor concrete look plastic and fake.

This chart summarizes the choices, which basically fall into four categories, only one of which (that excerpted above) maintains natural looking concrete. 

Here's the kicker, though: Perhaps because concrete sealing is not very popular in this area, few products in the silane / siloxane / silicate class were for sale locally.  (The other probable reason for the non-availability is that, here in the deep south, we don't have to worry about frost damage to our concrete, and frost damage is what these things were intended to prevent).  After doing additional research, we settled upon Drivehard Concrete and Masonry Weatherproofer for our main patio, which we had to order for delivery.

It looks like this and is described as being a "nano-silicone / silicate" based product. 

However, we have two patios, and with so little information to go on, we were not sure which formulation would work best in our climate.  Therefore, we also bought this other option which was available locally at big-box hardware stores.  We figured we'd compare the performance of the two over time, one on each patio.

Behr Premium Protector and Waterproofer.  It is described mostly as a silicone product, whatever that means.  

Especially this year with the abnormally high rainfall we have been having, it has been a struggle to keep both patios even slightly clean.

I had initially pressure washed earlier this spring and then was waiting for a dry day to apply the sealant. Well, with all the rain, a dry day did not arrive, and meanwhile, this is the amount of algae that re-grew just within a matter of weeks.  I had to pressure wash all over again as if the first washing never even happened.  

Here is a test spot of the Behr product on our smaller patio.  I had put down the tape because when the concrete is dry, it's impossible to see where the product was applied.  But you sure can see the application when the un-treated concrete gets rained on.  

This is a view of the Drivehard product application in progress on our larger patio.  It goes down like plain water.  I did not just apply one coat - I went over it, and over it, and over it, each time making a new pass to add more product to areas where the concrete soaked up the initial roll-out.  The instructions say that you can do this as long as the initial coat does not completely dry in between applications.  

Here is a finished view of the larger patio while it is partly wet and partly dry.  If you look carefully, you can see that the edges beyond the concrete seam have some standing water, but the sealant excludes a lot of it from soaking in, such that it no longer darkens when wet.  

This is a close-up view of the treated concrete.  Some water does still penetrate, but a lot of it beads on the surface. 

Both products performed as advertised in that they did not leave a visible residue or coating.  The concrete on both patios still looks "natural" and uncoated.  I will re-edit this post in the future with a verdict if one proves to be superior to the other.

And this is the first of two posts that will celebrate that fact. 

Home security system false alarms: One mystery solved

Have you ever had your home security system fail and produce false alarms and you just can't figure out why it's doing that?  If you try to search the problem on the internet, you're going to be hit with an avalanche of sales sites and other useless information.  I'm going to describe one means by which a common type of residential alarm can fail periodically and erratically in a way that was surprisingly difficult for us to determine.  This is one thing you can check for as you are troubleshooting your own system.

Few things in everyday suburban life are as annoying as an alarm system that refuses to function.

Screengrabbed from www.memegenerator.com

Most simple home security systems use magnetic sensors on windows and doors.

They look something like this, usually screwed to the window sill.  If anything interferes with the magnetic signal between the magnet attached to the window and the sensor attached to the frame, the system will fault and produce a false alarm if it happens to be armed at the time when the fault occurs.    

In our case, the fault problem was ultimately caused by an aluminum window blind.  I had initially discounted that blind as a possible cause because of three assumptions that I subsequently learned were not correct:

NUMBER ONE - I had assumed that an aluminum blind was, in fact, made of aluminum (duh) and, as a non-ferrous metal, it would not interfere with the magnet.  I had paid a lot of money for these blinds because they are mounted on our two garage windows.  I wanted all-aluminum to ensure that they would not rust over time (we live in the humid subtropics and so corrosion is a concern).

As it turns out, the blinds themselves are aluminum, but a few of the trimmings are made of steel.  And this particular little trimming just happens to fall exactly where the magnet is located.  

NUMBER TWO - I had underestimated the *exquisite* degree to which the magnet was sensitive to the placement of the bottom rail of the window blind.  Literally a half an inch separated "no alarm problems" from "nothing but alarm problems".  For as long as the blind was 100% lowered, there would be no problem.  But if someone left it just a bit elevated, the alarm system would behave erratically, producing faults.

There's also a third reason why it was very difficult to troubleshoot this issue.  When we first installed those blinds several years ago, they were neat and pretty and new, and everyone in the house basically left them in place, lowered all the way down.  We went for three years with no alarm faults.  Then all of a sudden, things started going haywire.  I'd be sitting quietly at my desk working, nobody else would be in the house, and I'd hear the alarm chime, indicating that a fault had just occurred.  Why would anyone logically suspect window blinds as the cause of a thing like that, given that they'd already been on the windows for years without incident?

But of course what happened over time is that family members had been raising and lowering them, sometimes leaving them in sloppy configurations.  And at one window, some garage equipment had gotten shoved up against the blind, further pushing the bottom rail up against the magnet.  And those changes were enough to tip the magnetic balance and make the sensor connection fade in and out unpredictably.  

This was the only way to reliably fix the weak link in this failure chain (remember, if the alarm faults and you can't get to your phone, the police come to your house and all heck breaks loose):

This will prevent a future family member from "forgetting" and leaving the blind in the wrong position, triggering a false alarm.

Go through your house and check all your window blind bottom rails.  Even if they're not aluminum, they might contain some metal parts that could be contributing to your alarm issues.

We also have faux wood and real wood blinds in our house.  I checked both for metal pieces.  The faux wood had a hollow bottom rail, but no metal was visible in there.  

The real wood blinds had no metal anywhere on or in the rail.  

Home office cord control

Are you like 99% of all Americans in that you struggle with managing all of the electrical and data cords associated with your home office and/or home-based business computer systems?!

Oh my sweet God.  This photo wasn't staged - that's actually what the space behind my computers looked like yesterday before I got started on this rehab project. 

Let's expand my shame to encompass more than one photo, shall we?  Here's a more horizontal shot, illustrating the abject failure of an organizational device I'd placed on the wall behind my system. 

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you might wonder what mental madness beset me such that I let my space degenerate into that hot mess, given that I pay so much attention to organization and detail in other areas of my home.

My answer is simple:  If I had a static home office system, maintaining order might be easy to achieve.  But I run a microbusiness in which I work as an embedded contractor.  I'm constantly running back and forth to different client sites, taking much of my computer equipment with me each time.  So my typical machine management modis operandi looks like this:

1. Take with.
2. Return and toss everything back onto desk.
3. Take with.
4. Return and toss everything back onto desk.
5. Repeat sequence about 98 more times each year.

So yes, my desk turns into an absolute nightmare on a regular basis because of this, as the photos above attest.  As I was going through my periodic attempt at clean-up yesterday, I thought I'd capture a few step-wise recommendations for you as you try valiantly to grapple with your own chronic mess.

Step #1:  Set aside a realistic period of time to complete this task, probably 1 to 2 unbroken hours.  Prepare yourself mentally for significant aggravation and boredom.  Put on some music, get a glass of wine, or whatever else you need to take your mind off the fact that you're engaged in an unfulfilling, low-quality chore which probably won't result in that much improvement in your status quo. 

Time either flies or drags, whichever you don't want it to do.  And during this task, it will surely drag. 

Low-resolution screengrab of Salvador Dali's famous melted clock artwork.  From Wikipedia, which isn't sure who should use this image. 

Step #2:  Assemble the right tools and equipment for the job. 

I'm partial to Velcro.  I don't like zip ties because they can't be readjusted. 

I decided to try some common cord conduit on this organizational go-round.  It's available for a very low price (this particular stuff is from IKEA). 

I think I was on the right track in including wall-based organization, but I didn't maximize its effectiveness.  If you go to the Container Store website and search for 'silver mesh', you'll see several of these products, but other products could also be used effectively. 

Step #3:  Gut your space.  Don't attempt to work around your existing mess because you'll just get bogged down and flummoxed.  Remove everything so that you can start afresh.  First label cables and cords if you're unsure of how to put it all back together.

Pull everything out of sockets, off the wall, etc. 

Step 4:  Examine critically what you're trying to accomplish and how, in order to determine whether there's a better way to structure your stuff.

My peripherals are partially supported on ELFA shelves above my main desk.  I noticed right away that I had run power cords for two printers and two spotlight lamps all the way down to the main UPS on the desk.  This is not efficient when those four devices could instead be fed by their own surge protector situated on the shelf above.  Therefore, I exchanged these four cords for one power strip that runs to the UPS. 

Furthermore I enclosed that power strip cord inside the conduit that also held the printer cables. 

These cord conduits are useful because you can split off individual cords at different points of emergence...

...and also because you can bundle excess cord lengths inside of them.  Why do computer sound system components have cords that stretch from here to eternity??  I don't know, but thank goodness that they are thin enough to wind up and stuff inside of conduit. 

What did I say about frustration??  Get ready for it.  I accidentally chopped a 12 volt DC line during this tedious process. 

Step 5:  Celebrate the light at the end of your tedious tunnel!!  Here's my finished product (minus the severed DC cord which I had to replace):

After almost two hours of effort, it looks only marginally improved relative to the starting condition.  How unsatisfying.

But looks can be deceiving.  It actually functions much better now. 

There are probably a few of you out there scratching your heads wondering why on earth I'd maintain such a Noah's Ark of connectivity on my desktop:  Two power cords, two VGA cables, two cable locks, two printer USBs, two Ethernet lines.  The obvious question is, why don't I instead buy [wireless this] and [docking that]...  I'm not going to get into the details of my business model, but suffice it to say that I need all this crap.  As ridiculous as it looks, my little business model runs smoothly via this approach. 

Anyway, here's the proverbial before and after photo.  Good luck with you own organizational efforts.  And for goodness sake, don't forget your glass of wine!!
:-)

The grey plastic conduit is not used so much for making things look prettier as it is for keeping the cords from getting tangled on a desktop where items are constantly being removed and replaced.  I tried to conduit components by function: 
-- The two Ethernet lines are in their own conduit. 
-- The two printer lines are bundled with the sound system cord into their own conduit.

Similarly, I tried to separate each wall component by function. 
-- The scoop-shaped hanging device on the far left holds two computer power adapters (and only those, because they move in and out of the office on almost a daily basis). 
-- The central rack holds smaller peripherals grouped in baskets by function (USB cords and other peripherals).
-- The right rack holds an external HD. 

Latest suburban oddity

This irritating thing:

My guess is that it's a specific error code, some kind of a subroutine built into this fixture to signal a short circuit, although I haven't tried to research it yet.  There's nothing like four inches of rain to really p*ss off the fire ants, and immediately after this started happening, I discovered that they had invaded the exterior wall right below this light.  Furthermore, we noticed that have been unable to reset a GFCI that ties into this wall (different circuit, same location).  I've never seen fire ants trash a motion light before, but with ants, there's a first time for everything. 

In case you need some background on this undesirable phenomenon, TAMU has a publication called "It's shocking what fire ants can do to electrical equipment".   Looks like my husband has his honey-do all laid out for his Sunday afternoon.  Bzzzzt. 

How to fix a granite countertop seam

Answer (in my opinion):  Hire a professional granite installer to do the job for you.  There's no way to DIY this kind of thing properly because it requires specialized tools and skills, and you could really screw up your expensive countertop if you make a mistake.

Here's how it went with our repair, and also an explanation of why we needed to repair our countertop in the first place.

This is the edge of our cooktop cut-out, which were also having trimmed at the same time as the seam was being fixed (mobilizing a service person is so expensive that we figured we might as well get everything done at once). 

When we built this house, we chose "five-quarter" (1.25" or five quarters of an inch) granite instead of the builder grade of granite, which is typically 0.75" thick.  It looks wonderful but it's bloody heavy. 

We have one seam in our countertop, which is comprised of one nine-foot and one six-foot span of granite in an L-shape.  That's an awful lot of granite to be meeting near the middle and staying put.  A lot of heavy granite, especially given the extra thickness that we paid for as an upgrade.  What I think happened is that the supportive under-cabinetry simply settled a little over the past three years (the wood grain compacted or whatever).  It wasn't much, but it was enough to move the two slabs differentially just a tiny bit, and destroy the original granite seam.

BEFORE:  It was gross.  The putty totally disintegrated and fell out.  Worse, the two sides of granite were no longer in plane.  One side was a tiny bit higher than the other, enough to serve as a "lip" and make cleaning impossible.  Water and food fell down into the open crack.  Sanitary fail. 

This is why a professional is needed.  In order to do this job right, it's not just a matter of mixing up a two-part epoxy and re-packing the seam.  The two pieces of granite must be planed so that they are put back to being a continuous uninterrupted smooth surface.  This picture is blurry because it's a long exposure (I didn't want the camera flash to go off in the tradesman's face), but this is a coarse diamond wheel he was using here in the first stage of grinding the area flat.   

This takes a long time and a lot of careful work with successively finer polishing grits.  Remember, after the two sides of the granite are ground down to the same height again, they will look like raw rock with a very dull, pitted surface.  The re-polishing is required to return the seam area to an appearance that matches the rest of the countertop.

AFTER:  Here's a close-up of the final result.  Yes, a seam is visible, but everything is sealed and back in plane and it doesn't look conspicuous from a distance.  Hopefully now that the cabinetry has had three years to settle, it's done moving and I won't have to re-do this seam again in the future (hopefully). 

We hired DE Flooring (no active website right now), which is located less than a mile from our subdivision in League City.  They sent a very nice tradesman over to do the work. 

Listing screengrabbed from Google.

It took the tradesman at least 90 minutes at our house to fix this seam and also to trim the original opening in the granite that had been cut for our cooktop (to be discussed in a future post).  DE Flooring charged me $300 for this service call, plus I always give a decent tip to service people (I was a service worker myself once upon a time).  Obviously this is not cheap, but again, in my opinion there's just no other way to get this kind of work done.  Suck it up, bubbas!!  Open your wallets and hire a professional if granite-grinding is what you need done. 

If I have experienced this seam separation problem, it's possible that other homeowners in Centerpointe have also faced the same issue, because the same building materials and tradesmen were used in many, many of our houses.  If you want to get your counter seam re-done, you might want to call DE and ask for the same tradesman they sent to my house (ask to speak to Mr. Abdul and describe the work - he'll remember the job, and if he doesn't, tell him that it was one of his Sept. 28, 2013 receivables).  I didn't get that contractor's name, but he's a really nice guy and he did good work for us. 

Hopefully this post saves at least one marriage.  Don't screw yourself - granite fixing is not on the honey-do list, she opined. 

Replacing the cord on pull-down attic stairs

This might not seem like a very important topic for you, but it might become a bit more front-and-center-of-your-attention if your pull cord suddenly snaps like mine did yesterday.

See how this man's right hand is pulling the cord that dangled from the underside of the stairs in this screengrab from a This Old House DIY webpage?  A similar common style of attic-access staircase was installed in our house by our builder. 

Before yesterday, I never really realized how flimsy that pull-down cord was.  Really, it's not much thicker than a piece of string or a window blind cord.  And it snapped as I was lowering the stairs.  Our house is just over 3 years old and we don't access the attic very much, so there wasn't that much wear and tear on this before it failed. 

Fortunately in my case, I was able to grab the edge of the stairs and pull them the rest of the way down by hand.  If instead the string had broken while they were still well above my head, they would have slammed back up into their ceiling frame and then I would have been looking at a more difficult situation.

The side-springs on these particular stairs are very tight, and the stair unit sits flush with the frame.  If it had slammed shut without a pull cord in place, I would have had to climb up there and try to wedge something into the crack to pry them loose.  Or maybe I would have had to screw on a solid gripper handle while they were still up in the ceiling, which would have been a pain. 

So my advice here is - check your pull cord, and if it's flimsy, you might want to replace it proactively with something heavier so that you can potentially avoid this snapping scenario.

I drilled out a larger hole for a better cord. 

This is a piece of mooring line intended for a small sailing dinghy such as a little Sunfish, perhaps.  I ran the line through and tied a bowline around a metal washer to keep it from pulling back out.   

If you don't know how to tie a bowline, it's worth learning because they never slip and yet at the same time, you can loosen them easily.

On the grab portion of the cord, I cut a section of my old split garden hose to use as a more comfortable hand-hold. 

Given that I was forced to do this maintenance on our pull-down stair unit, I scanned the internet in order to see whether there was anything else stair-related for which I ought to be on the lookout while I was at it.  I did find references to a class-action lawsuit (e.g., here and here) that alleged premature hinge failure.  Our stairs do not appear to be of the age referenced by those actions, but I'll be eyeballing our hinge from time to time anyway, just in case, because a failure of that type had never occurred to me as a possibility. 

Yet another minor mishap transmuted into an equally-minor missive of the blogging variety. 

Lousy lintels

This is kind of a one-off post, but because it's spring and people are doing spring cleaning and home maintenance, I thought I'd insert it here.

I'd like to describe an issue that bedeviled a house purchase we attempted to make in the year before signing a build contract in Centerpointe.  It involved the issue of window lintels and once again, I must insert all of the usual disclaimers.  What I'm going to describe here includes a personal account of professional judgments that I received from a home inspection contractor and a masonry contractor with respect to a specific situation at a specific single-family residence that was for sale at the time.  Those contractors' interpretations are not necessarily applicable to anyone else's situation, because every house must be individually evaluated by a professional.  I'm not providing any specific advice with this blog post - I'm just relating a personal experience. 

First of all, what are window lintels?

They are specialized structural members that support the brick façade above a window.  They are inserted in line with the brick courses for this purpose.  It's that dark gray thing in the photo above, which was screengrabbed from this vendor site in the United Kingdom. 

Here's another well-done rendition as screengrabbed from the website of this Seattle-based home inspection provider. 

"Usually of steel, stone, or wood", but in Texas suburban construction, they seem to be most commonly made of steel.  This may have something to do with building codes - I don't know. 

Anyway, it is customary to hire a third party to do a home inspection before you buy any house.  Myself, I've used the local vendor Terry Black repeatedly over the years.  In fact, I retained Mr. Black to inspect our Centerpointe house while it was being constructed, because home construction is complicated and it proceeds very quickly and I think it's well worth a few hundred dollars in fees to have an extra pair of eyes checking to see if there's anything that might have been missed by accident.

But back to my previous failed purchase story.  Our inspector called out the condition of that home's lintels in his report. 

The problem with steel lintels is that steel is subject to rust.  Here is an unrelated photo from this Australian site showing such a condition on another house.  (I have not reproduced any content from Mr. Black's report in this blog post.) 

In the case of our prospective buy house, the steel had rusted to an extent that both our inspector and a mason I contacted to give me a repair bid alleged that it needed to be replaced ASAP. 

Here's a close-up of a lintel on the house we attempted to buy.  According to the masonry contractor who gave me a bid to repair it, what happens in a situation like this is that the steel swells as it oxidizes.  As it swells, it applies upward pressure that cracks the mortar in the section of exterior wall above it, and then the façade loses its structural integrity as those cracks physically separate those over-window sections from the rest of the wall. 

This is the result.  Do you see that crack extending upward from the corner of the lintel? 

In this case, the cracks were observed to zig-zag up the side of this two-story house, essentially above every window on that house.   

That house was substantially less than 10 years old, and according to the professionals with whom I consulted, this type of rusting and cracking does not represent a normal issue.  Compare with the lintel condition of a 20-year-old house that I examined, just so that I could wrap my mind around this issue of lousy lintels:

This is an example of a lintel on a house about three times the age of the house that had the rusted ones shown above.  Here you see a little bit of surface pitting on the lintel, but the lintel itself is intact and not swelling.  There were no cracks visible in the brick façade above this window. 

According to my masonry contractor, lintels left unrepaired will eventually fail and the section of brick façade above them will simply tumble off the house, because at that point, there's no structural integrity remaining to hold them. 

Badly rusted lintels can be replaced, but it's an extremely labor-intensive process.  It's essentially necessary to remove a significant amount of the façade so that they can retrofit a new lintel above each window, and then return the brick to the wall.  Some bricks might get damaged by the removal, necessitating replacement with new brick.  And it's not assured that you'll be able to perfectly-match a particular brick color.  So this whole process is a bit dicey. 

And expensive.  The bid given to me to repair that particular house was between $8,000 and $9,000.  We did want that house, and so we gave our sellers a choice:  either reduce the price by that amount so that we could hire for the repair, or go through the process of making a structural warranty claim themselves, given that the house was less than 10 years old.  But we ourselves were not prepared to get all wrapped up in the hassle and uncertainty of making a structural warranty claim (there's no guarantee that any given claim will be approved).  We were just trying to buy a house. 

Ultimately, those sellers were not willing to negotiate, and so we had to kill that contract.  At that point, I said to my husband, "That does it.  We're getting a one-story house, because I never want to see another builder-grade tract-home window lintel again in my life."  I said that because, on eight-foot stud walls, there's usually little or no façade structure to support above a window, so they can often just be framed in without steel lintels. 

And that is part of the colorful and roundabout tale of how we ended up in Centerpointe (with a one-story house to boot, thank you).  At this point you probably want to ask, "So what should I do to ensure that my lintels don't go bad?"  The answer is that I haven't got the faintest clue because I don't know what causes that kind of problem in the first place (improper construction? improper metallurgy? who knows?), and in fact the cause may vary case-to-case.  Some internet sites recommend keeping them painted, but of course some of the lintel is inserted back into the wall behind the brick and is inaccessible to a paint brush, so it's not clear how it should be dealt with, other than, if you think you might have an issue, talk to a qualified professional. 

Screengrabbed from this interesting thread.